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Abstract

Collaboration forms an integral aspect of global research endeavors, where co-authorship derived from bibliographic records provides the building block for mapping research collaboration networks. Bibliometric techniques and social network analysis tools were applied to measure the scope and depth of collaboration in biomedical research in Southeast Asia during the period 2005-2009. In particular, centrality scores and draw network maps were calculated for both country and institutional levels of aggregation. In the field of biomedical research, Thailand and Singapore are the most productive and collaborative countries in Southeast Asia during the period studied. Using network analysis, there was strong correlation of research productivity by a country or institution with the number of collaboration and its group influence, and weak correlation with maximal data flow within the research network. There were specific clusters of connected institutions in subnetworks for neoplasm, diabetes, and tuberculosis research. Given the observed frequency of regional collaboration in Southeast Asia, in comparison to foreign collaboration, it is argued that increasing the number of collaborations within Southeast Asia will help advance the region’s efforts on domestic and regional health issues.

Author Comment

This paper will be submitted to PeerJ for review. Initial feedback to this preprint may be coursed through the correspondence indicated.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests in the publication of this preprint.

Author Contributions

Vincent Schubert R Malbas conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Funding

Sciverse Scopus data have been previously downloaded as part of a completed project funded by the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) of the World Health Organization (WHO). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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